Efficient FPGA Realization of CORDIC With Application to Robotic Exploration

We present an area efficient method and field programmable gate array (FPGA) realization for two common operations in robotics, namely, the following: (1) rotating a vector in 2D and (2) aligning a vector in the plane with a specific axis. It is based on a new coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm that is designed to work with a small set of elementary angles. Unlike conventional CORDIC, the proposed algorithm does not require a ROM and a full-fledged barrel shifter. The proposed CORDIC algorithm is used to design hardware efficient solutions for two mobile robotic tasks in an indoor environment without employing division and floating-point calculations. Experiments with a sole low end FPGA based robot in static as well as dynamic environments validate the power of the approach.